One of Grants.gov’s newest features gives the Workspace Owner, AORs with MPIN access, and the E-Business Point of Contact the ability to limit access to budget forms. These forms often contain confidential information, such as salary data.

With Release 16.0, controls have been added to permit specific users to view and edit the budget form data.

The Grants.gov Support Center helps a lot of you resolve problems and complete your federal grant applications before the deadline. One of the most common questions the Support Center gets is how to use Workspace forms.

Below are general steps to answer that question. “General” because the steps below depend on whether you are filling out a webform or a PDF version of the form—you get to choose. Since this is the most common Workspace-related question to the Support Center, we know many of you have no problem creating a workspace since the forms are only accessible through that.

The “Congressional District of Applicant” field is just one tiny rectangle on the SF-424 form, but if you get it wrong, it can create complications for your application downstream.

In this field, the grant-making agency expects a code that begins with your state’s two-letter abbreviation and ends with a three-digit district number. A hyphen separates the two parts, like this, “VA-001” [State of Virginia – 1st Congressional District].

The latest updates to the Grants.gov system bring significant improvements to Workspace to better accommodate our diverse group of applicants. Below are the essentials for this release and links to more detailed information.

This week’s Funding Friday post highlights grant opportunities from the “Income Security and Social Services” category in Grants.gov Search. You can easily filter funding opportunities by this and other categories, such as education, consumer protection and natural resources.

Applying for a federal grant can be a lot of work involving many moving parts. On top of strategizing, conducting meetings, and writing a compelling proposal, there are other little-but-necessary tasks on the path to successfully submitting your application that you should do well before the closing date.

You may have seen the video below about the benefits of Workspace. One user who watched the video wrote to us recently and requested videos that explain how to use Workspace. The good news is they already exist!

We have created two video series that can assist applicants applying for federal grants using Workspace.

This week’s Funding Friday post highlights grant opportunities from the Law, Justice and Legal Services category in Grants.gov Search. You can easily filter funding opportunities by this and other categories, such as Natural Resources, Health, Education, Community Development and many more.

The United States Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, is seeking applications from qualified Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), Educational Institutions and other qualified organizations for a Grant/Cooperative to implement a two (2) year program entitled “Strengthening Law Enforcement’s Partnerships with Women’s Justice Centers”.